We Face Graver Challenges Than Defeating Gravity

April 4, 1986|By Alan Nordstrom

Why is there a full-page advertisement, ''Letter to the American People,'' in last Sunday's New York Times, with Isaac Asimov's name leading the underwriters, pleading to expand the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's orbiter program? Because it is humankind's primal urge to ascend.

Consider the ways we describe success and happiness. You work your way ''up the ladder.'' You try to ''rise in the world.'' You ''hitch your wagon to a star.'' You become a ''rising star.'' You aspire to ''heaven above.'' Or you just ''get high on life.'' And if you can't, then you look for other ways of getting ''high,'' getting a ''lift'' or a ''pick-me-up.''

Up is good. Down is bad. Down is depression, sickness, defeat. Down is hell. Everyone wants to rise up and be done with ''downers.''

Everyone naturally and instinctively wants to transcend gravity and the grave -- or what is Easter for, and heaven and reincarnation? We don't want death to keep us down any more than life. We would transcend mortality in all its aspects.

Something essential in the human spirit (and even our concept of ''the human spirit'' implies it) needs to transcend, to rise above, our gravity- bearing, grave-borne bodies and soar into some ethereal reaches of bliss and beatitude. We yearn for elevation.

Even our humor is ''levity'' because it lifts our hearts, and perhaps nothing is more human than laughter.

The pursuit of happiness is our national goal, permitted by the life and liberty that necessarily precede it. And happiness implies not only good fortune but joy, the emotion of spiritual uplift.

So, in all ways, human hope points upward, to the stars. We seek release from gravity and whatever else pins us down. Our souls aspire to soar like eagles and angels. They crave to escape the dirty confines of Earth and venture into the pure, weightless vastness of outer space -- ''to boldly go where no man has gone before.''

The heavens always have been our metaphor for transcendence; now they are our literal goal.

The science that has destroyed our old myths of heaven now offers us the stars themselves, or at least the planets, as our challenging aspiration. And the shuttle Challenger symbolizes our new quest, for we cannot be fully human without a quest, a frontier or a challenge to rise above and beyond ourselves. The name of the Challenger and its skyward mission inevitably seize our questing imaginations, but the question yet remains whether transcending the surface of our planet is the sort of transcendence our race most urgently needs. There are other ways up than out into space. There are graver challenges facing us than defeating gravity. And the challenge of becoming fully human can be met right here on Earth, where humanity is still ascending.